


The Tender and Growing Night

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: Age Difference, Canon Character of Color, Canon Gay Relationship, College, Contango the Wonder Dog, Interracial Relationship, M/M, Older Man/Younger Man, Pumpkin Soup, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-06 20:46:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen's doing his PhD at Harvard; Guert's the now openly-gay president of Westish and an acclaimed author. They haven't seen each other in two years. Owen decides to win back his man.</p><p>Spoilers for most of the book. Title from Whitman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tender and Growing Night

Owen’s fledgling interest in amateur burglary had been brought to an abrupt halt by circumstances that, he reflected, he really should have anticipated.

It was two years since he had last visited Westish – graduation on a fine day in early summer, the breeze from the lake making graduation robes almost bearable in the heat – and three since he’d last been in this garden, lying almost where he was now. Except then there had been a soft blanket beneath his back rather than just grass, and then he’d had his limbs tangled up with those of his lover, not a large, frost-white, one-eyed husky who had pinned him down the moment he’d hopped over the fence at the edge of the property. 

Initially he’d taken it for a welcome: Contango was a friendly dog, and Owen had spent a lot of time with him three summers ago, helping Guert and Pella move into the new house. But that was three summers ago. Owen, who had never had a dog of his own, was unsure how far back their memories might go. And, in any case, even most humans he knew would be unfriendly toward men they found clambering unannounced into their backyards. 

The good news was that Contango wasn’t snarling or threatening to rip out his throat, just looking at him with one-eyed curiosity, sniffing at the flowers crushed against Owen’s chest. The bad was that Contango wasn’t making it easy for him to get up either. At least not without wrestling the dog off, which wasn’t going to end well. Contango had claws. Owen had an iPhone.

“Good boy?” Owen said. He held up his palm for Contango to nuzzle. “I’m Owen, remember? I’m here to see Guert.”

Huskies were bright animals all round, and Contango was usually happy to do what his adopted humans told him… but he was probably in no danger of passing English 101 at Westish College. Owen glanced over toward the wooden shed by the lake. “Guert?” he called, hopefully. “Help?”

But it was really too early for Guert to be home. Even in June, Owen knew, he’d be putting in a full day behind his desk whether he liked it or not. Presumably the only thing to do was wait until Contango found something more interesting to do than stand on him...

“Owen? What on earth are you doing?”

Owen blinked up into the sunlight, tried to turn his head. “Pella?”

Moments later there was the sound of the patio door opening and then hands being impatiently clapped. “Contango, get off him.” She lodged her fingers behind the dog’s collar and tugged him away. Contango whined and then, pretending that he had just been about to leave _anyway_ , loped through the back door into the kitchen.

Owen had come to Westish in a new suit and nicely-polished shoes, contact lenses replacing his old glasses, hoping to look smart and dapper and very far removed from the student he’d once been who strolled around the campus in his yin-yang pajamas and flip-flops. Presumably, if he’d wanted to preserve that aura of sophistication, he should’ve knocked at the front door.

Pella, two years older than him but still in a Harpooners t-shirt, gave him a hand up, dusting petals from his lapels. “If you’re trying to make off with our TV, you’d better try next door. Dad still doesn’t have one.”

“Sorry.” He shook the flowers he was grasping. They looked worse than forlorn now. “Failed romantic gesture.”

“I don’t know. I think Contango’s quite taken with you.” He and Pella had always been on uncertain terms despite their shared closeness to Mike, Henry, and her dad. Even in that last Westish summer, when he’d been teaching playwriting and had found himself here in this house almost every evening, Pella had avoided spending much time in his company: giving him and Guert time alone, yes, but also giving the cold shoulder to the man destined to break her father’s heart. 

Now she was merely observing him with vague amusement, her expression more or less like Contango’s had been. “You brought my dad flowers?”

“In the circumstances, scotch would’ve been a worse idea.” On the other hand, dealing with a drunk dog and a trip to the emergency room could be seen as a gift of inspiration for Guert’s next book.

“Well, he’s not home yet. You can check his office, or hang out here. I’m just finishing off a paper, but help yourself to coffee. Try not to let Contango maul you.”

Even after three years, Guert hadn’t accumulated much furniture other than beautiful pine bookcases, which lined the walls of his study and much of the living room. Owen sipped his coffee and studied the titles, then the few framed family photographs on the walls. Once he’d lived here more regularly than Pella had... but that had only lasted three months. He’d gone to Tokyo and made himself into a stranger in Guert’s home, the home that could have been theirs together.

They’d never really broken up: at least, not in the way he and Jason Gomes had broken up, with tears and arguments and erasing of phone numbers. Guert had always accepted that he would be going away, first to Tokyo and then to undertake a graduate degree or seek employment somewhere far more cosmopolitan than Westish. Owen, for his part, had never made any concrete commitments either way… but it would have been foolish to pass up an opportunity like the Trowell-funded year in Japan, and by the time he returned he had a world of prospects calling. He and Guert had only been able to steal a moment away from the graduation festivities to share a cigarette down by the lake. 

“I’m building that writing shed,” Guert had said. “You’re very welcome to use it anytime you’re in the neighborhood and in need of a little isolation.”

He hadn’t been in the neighborhood for two years, although they e-mailed back and forth semi-regularly. Guert’s publisher had made him set up a Twitter account, which apparently wasn’t optional these days even for Thoreau-worshipping authors over sixty. The success of that first novel, a new work Guert had blown through in six months of evenings and weekends, had both secured and briefly endangered his tenure as Westish president. Critical success was always impressive, as was the Westish name on thousands of books worldwide, but Bruce Gibbs, Guert had explained by e-mail, had been uncertain how the conservative trustees might react to their president gaining a modicum of international fame on the back of what was largely a gay love story. “My career’s mostly based on a book called _The Sperm-Squeezers_ ,” Guert had said. “Why would anyone be even remotely surprised I’m gay?”

Guert’s literary coming-out had generated some interest from bloggers and the media, who were principally interested in him not as a gay author, but as a gay college president, particularly once they racked through the news archives and found his dashing younger self being swooned over by news anchors on CNN. The story was just too good to pass up, particularly as the modern-day Guert was just as dashing. Maybe even more so, with his tailored suits and silver-gray hair.

For his part, Guert was evasive about the details of his private life, preferring to talk about Pella and the college, as well as his usual array of long-dead nineteenth century writers. Owen’s name never came up. Even in the dedication of Guert’s novel, “For Pella and O”, he was just an initial. Even Genevieve, with her journalist’s attention to detail and mother’s knowledge of her son, had only ever _suspected_. She hadn’t been there while Owen had cried and moped around Tokyo, missing Guert desperately. Still, time could heal a lot of things. He’d moved on, picked up a baseball bat, asked a boy out for coffee. On his return to the US he’d gone to Harvard and started a relationship with a fellow PhD candidate, a jock who rowed and felt as passionately about the environment as he did. He’d tried to be happy. 

It stood to reason he couldn’t be with Guert forever. Guert was forty years older than him and the president of his alma mater. Their relationship was nothing more than Owen’s teenage fixation on _The Sperm-Squeezers_ and ongoing issues about his absent father, combined with Guert’s lifetime-long denial of his own sexuality, which had evidently made him fall for the first gay man who gave him one iota of affection. Owen himself was perpetually falling for men he knew would leave him – Jason, a senior who wasn’t even out of the closet at home, then Guert, then Ryan in Tokyo, who was devoted to his younger siblings and wouldn’t have followed Owen back to the States in a million years.

He could psychoanalyze himself as much as he wanted, but that hadn’t stopped him from breaking up with yet another boyfriend and returning unannounced to his former lover’s home, disturbing his daughter, terrorizing his dog, and actually goddamn _smelling the couch_ because he missed him so much.

“Is he seeing anyone?” he had asked Pella while she pulled out a bag of coffee beans from the fridge.

“Like he’d tell me if he was,” she had shrugged and plunked the bag down by the espresso machine. “Owen, you’re a good guy. You’re like a brother to Mike and Henry. But if you’re here to break his heart again, I’d prefer you just leave.”

“I didn’t come to hurt him.”

“Being here at all is bad enough. Like anyone can read his book and not know how he felt about you. It’s the way he feels about _Moby-Dick_. My dad doesn’t love very many things and hardly any people, but when he does, he loves them forever.”

Three years he’d lost of Guert’s life. Guert was sixty-four now, not that his age had ever meant much to Owen. Still… he might be thinking about retirement, writing as a permanent occupation, spending more time by the lake. It was precisely the opposite of what Owen, at twenty-four, was supposed to be considering. And yet.

A shadow appeared on the porch and Contango barked as the door opened, greeting Guert with a paw on each shoulder and an enthusiastically wagging tail. “Yeah, yeah, okay...” Guert said, affectionately scratching the scruff of Contango’s neck. Two years evidently hadn’t made much difference to him, except for perhaps a bit more silver in that thick gray hair, which made Owen suspect they hadn’t made as much of a difference to himself either, even if he would have liked to believe otherwise. 

Guert glanced over toward the couch where Owen was sitting, nervously hanging onto his coffee mug, and gave Contango an absent pat. “You didn’t tell me we had a visitor,” he said softly, setting his briefcase down by the door and stretching out a presidential hand toward Owen. “Hello Owen. How are you?”

Never mind the months they’d spent as lovers and all the nights Owen had held him close, Guert still made him feel like the little eighteen-year-old boy he’d been when they’d first met, when he’d been introduced to Guert as the winner of the Maria Westish Award and Guert had warmly shaken his hand, disarmingly friendly without giving the impression that he would ever be Owen’s _friend_.

“I’m fine. Good.” Owen stood up, grasping Guert’s hand firmly. “I… brought you flowers, but they sort of...” He gestured toward Contango, who was looking typically innocent.

A flicker of a smile crossed Guert’s lips. “They did, did they?” And then Owen was in Guert’s arms, just the same sort of enveloping hug he might get from Mike, except with Mike he would never close his eyes and settle his head against that broad shoulder, breathing in apple butter cologne, contemplating kissing lips that had gone unkissed (by him, at least) for two years…

Guert broke away first. “I have to take the dog out. Pick up some papers I need to work on over the weekend. You can come, if you like. Tell me whatever’s on your mind. Pella will probably thank us for getting out of her way.” 

They left their jackets and ties folded over the couch, Contango trotting in front of them through the neighborhood as if to show that he didn’t need and indeed barely tolerated their company. Their path followed the lakeshore as much as possible, down paved streets before cutting through a park and then onto the real, rough shoreline that led to the college grounds. 

“How’s your mother?” Guert asked eventually, the very picture of Midwestern politeness.

“She’s great.” He could have elaborated – on the twists of her career and her often unwise dating decisions – but he no longer had any of the patience required for small talk. 

“Your thesis?”

“Going as planned.”

Guert fell silent, hands in his pockets, studying the grass at their feet as they walked. In the past when he was clearly being reticent, bottling up his feelings, Owen had tended to kiss him out of it. Now that didn’t seem to be an option. 

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked.

Another wry smile. “Pella makes me date. It turns out I’m not so bad at gay flirting as I thought.”

“Anything serious?”

Guert waved a hand noncommittally. “What about your rower?” They had reached the boundary of the college land, Contango having wandered off to nose at some trees.

“We broke up.” Owen stopped walking in the hope Guert would too. Inside the college there would be students, students who would not only watch them, but want to talk to their handsome president. Everyone always wanted to talk to Guert. “I broke up with him.”

“I’m sorry.”

Guert did stop then, his back to the shore, his deep gray eyes on Owen’s. “You look so much younger without your glasses,” he said, stroking his thumb down Owen’s cheek before thrusting the hand back into his pocket. It was as if the wall between them had crumbled.

Self-conscious, Owen reached to straighten frames that were no longer there. “Really? I should’ve grown a beard instead. It would only take me till I’m thirty-five.”

“Why are you here, O?”

“You know why I’m here.”

Contango passed between them, rubbing against Guert’s shins. “We talked about this. We agreed. You have to live your life, go to school. There’s nothing for you in this part of the world.”

“There’s you.”

Guert breathed out, stared at Owen’s by now rather scuffed shoes. “Owen…”

“I’ve had three years, Guert. Three years of living other places and dating other guys, and all it’s amounted to is three years I could’ve been with you and wasn’t. You’re not some stupid crush. You never were. I don’t want to be some guy you used to know. I don’t just want to _date_ you. If anything, I want to marry you.”

That, at least, made Guert look up. “You’re not in Massachusetts anymore, you know.”

“Guert, I sit up every night worrying about carbon emissions and eroded wetlands and melting polar icecaps. The world’s going to hell. You think I care about getting a court’s permission to be with the man I love?”

It was on that last word that Guert pulled him into a hug that, this time, lasted much longer than one of Mike’s ever would. “You worry far too much,” Guert said by his ear. “Worrying’s my job.”

“You don’t worry nearly enough. How’s Students for a Responsible Westish doing without me?”

“Oh, wonderfully. They do a lot of shouting every semester until they realize I actually agree with them. If only we could run Bunsen burners on student agitation.” Hands clasped behind Owen’s back, Guert looked him in the eye. “You’re sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sixty-four.”

“I know.”

“I don’t smoke anymore.”

“Me neither. Well, except pot. Sometimes.”

“I take a fistful of pills twice a day.”

“Okay.”

“I’m probably going to go bald.”

“Liar.”

There was no soaring operatic score, which was occasionally how Owen imagined it in his head – he imagined that all of Guert’s actions, including memo writing and sharpening pencils, were accompanied by a soaring operatic score – but two years after that goodbye kiss on the shore, it was a very nice kiss indeed, Owen’s fingers tangling in Guert’s thick hair just to prove himself right. Unlike their first kiss, there were no unaccommodating family members ten feet away… but unlike their second, there was no suitable couch nearby for convenient lovemaking. 

“There’s no one around,” he said, tugging experimentally at Guert’s belt. If Thoreau had never explicitly mentioned the benefits of spontaneous, open-air sex, he would certainly have condoned it. Guert, however, just batted his hand away with a laugh.

“I have an actual bedroom at home, if you’d forgotten. I’ll just have to bribe Pella with twenty bucks to go on a date or something.”

“Twenty bucks?”

“It worked when she was twelve.”

After navigating a way past the boundary fence, they walked up the embankment onto a paved campus path, Contango now bored and lagging behind them. Guert glanced back, an arm around Owen’s shoulders. “He’s getting old. He thinks he’s a puppy, but he’s getting old.”

Owen nudged him in the ribs. “Are you getting all allegorical on me? How’s the presidency going, by the way?”

“Oh, fine. Better than expected this year in terms of fundraising. Bruce was full of dire predictions. Thought the moms wouldn’t like me anymore now that I’m an ‘out gay man’, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Guert, you’re gorgeous, charming, a devoted single father, and apparently celibate. What’s not to like?”

Guert pressed a kiss to his temple as they entered the Large Quad. “At least one of those points may change soon – hello Evan!”

Dean Melkin had crossed their path carrying a large stack of binders, which he had briefly attempted to hide behind. “Ah, hello Guert.”

“I think you know Owen. One of our brightest graduates.”

“Yes, yes. Of course I know Owen.” The Dean stuck out a hand to shake Owen’s, the binders balanced precariously, as he tried to achieve the feat of not noticing where Guert’s arm was settled. “Are you, um, teaching here this summer?”

Owen reached up to intertwine his fingers with Guert’s. “Not this time. Just visiting my boyfriend.”

“I see, I see.” Dean Melkin nodded, having now decided to look at the paving stones beneath their feet, before looking up again, some facet of his position perhaps having occurred to him. “I didn’t realize… Have you been together long?”

“Couple of months,” Owen said. 

“Ah.” The Dean nodded again, frowning slightly like a rookie detective trying to find the line of questioning that would make his suspect confess everything. “Well, I really should be going. I’ll see you on Monday, President Affenlight.”

He set off, disappearing into the entranceway of Glendinning Hall just as Contango poked his nose into Owen’s palm. Guert was already raising a hand to greet a gaggle of students, who possibly just wanted to get closer and see who the president was hugging. It wasn’t exactly _Us Weekly_ -caliber gossip, but around these parts you took what you could get.

“They’re going to figure it out, you know,” Owen said once the students went past. “You and me. Three years ago.” Once anyone started looking there were more than enough clues – Guert’s official diary, his hospital visits, and of course his book.

“He already has figured it out,” Guert said. “But there’s no advantage to him in pressing the point. You haven’t been a student in years, and it would just bring Westish into disrepute. Which they might argue I’m doing anyway, parading my male lover around, but what’s the worst they can do? Fire me? Good. I’ll have more time to work on my novel.”

Owen squeezed his fingertips. “If I’d realized there would be parading, I’d have brought more suits.”

They fetched the papers from Guert’s office, smooched a little on the love seat for old time’s sake, and headed home, this time opting for well-lit streets rather than the shore. Pella was gone by the time they arrived, out at Carapelli’s with Mike, and what Owen heard of Guert’s phone conversation with her sounded promising.

He hadn’t brought much with him from Harvard – his laptop and a gymbag full of clothes and books. Even packing that much had seemed optimistic when he’d set off the previous afternoon, but Guert cleared him some drawer space and helped him set up his computer in the study, and it was almost as if those three years had never passed at all. 

“Are you hungry? There’s pumpkin soup. I make great pumpkin soup.”

Owen eyed the stovetop suspiciously. “You do?”

“Of course! They grow right outside. You must’ve seen them.”

Owen had a vague recollection of Guert once telling him he intended to grow pumpkins in the garden of his then-new house… but that was the sort of thing everyone said when they bought a new place. Guert, though, had actually done it. The shed too. All that was missing were the solar panels… Well, if he needed a project for the summer other than his thesis and their relationship, that was most certainly it.

After a dinner of pumpkin soup and wine, which Owen had never imagined might go together and, indeed, probably didn’t, they took the rest of the bottle outside and lay on a blanket by the shore, gazing up at the stars. For a while, a long while, the stars were all he could see, the only sounds the waves and Guert’s breathing. 

They kissed in silence, pulled off clothes with no pretension to elegance. “I have a _bed_ ,” Guert insisted, but he was smiling when Owen kissed him again and pressed him down into the soft wool, long fingers splayed against the grass. 

It was so good to just feel Guert’s body again, to push away fabric and find a warm, corporeal form rather than the insubstantial flickers of e-mail and fiction and memories that had sustained him for two years. “I love you,” Owen murmured. “I love you.” Guert’s eyes were full of stars.

“You brought me flowers?” Guert said later, much later, the breeze from the lake just beginning to be uncomfortably cold against bare skin. Or, at least, Californian-born bare skin. “No one’s ever brought me flowers before.”

“Maybe they have. You just never found the bodies.”

Guert chuckled, his hair tickling Owen’s shoulder. Together, they looked up at the night sky again. “You’re going to go back to Cambridge in the fall,” he said finally. 

“For a little while.”

“And then?”

In a year, Pella would have graduated and Guert would be sixty-five. Old enough to bow out from Westish and perhaps relocate, if Owen found a position elsewhere. Or perhaps Guert would remain president and Owen would move to Westish permanently, living the writerly life by the lake. 

Maybe they’d even travel the world together, sent by Guert’s publisher to book fairs in Europe and Australia, and Owen would quietly drink tea in street cafés, listening to interviewer after interviewer politely ask about the young man who was always by Guert’s side. There were worse things than being Guert Affenlight’s toyboy and muse, particularly if he had a doctoral degree and nascent writing career of his own.

Owen kissed Guert’s forehead, holding him a little tighter in the night air. “We’ll figure it out,” he said.


End file.
